Megyn Kelly, “Kidult” Culture, and Me

When I was fifteen years old, I fell deeply in love with my geometry teacher. Let’s call her “Ms. Shimizu.” In my recollection, she was tall, thirtyish, and resplendent with confidence and grace. I would’ve gladly let her teach me the rudiments of grown-up romance. Ms. Shimizu possessed wisdom enough to strategically ignore my fumbling teenage flirtation. But she spoke to me like an adult, teaching me the respect I should expect to give and receive as an adult.

I remembered Ms. Shimizu this week, when former Fox News ingenue Megyn Kelly delivered her cack-handed and obnoxious defense of grown men chasing teenage girls. Kelly’s claim of a categorical difference between prepubescent children, and adolescent teens, provides just enough rhetorical coverage to justify those who already believe that. But it does nothing to address the question of whether teenagers can provide informed consent to adult sex.

My teenage infatuation with Ms. Shimizu taught me two tentpole principles of my philosophy of consent. First, yes, adolescents are sexual beings, and censorious adult efforts to squelch teen sexuality have maladaptive consequences later in adulthood. But second, adolescents don’t have sex for the same reasons adults do. Teenagers have sex for the reason grade-schoolers run and jump and scream constantly: they’re learning to control their rapidly changing bodies.

This carries an important corollary: I can only imagine three reasons adults would pursue sexual relationships with teenagers. Either they’ve forgotten the different reasons adults and teens have sex; or they’re enacting their own arrested adolescent psychosexual development; or they’re simply bad people. Each of these reasons carries its own appropriate response: education, treatment, or punishment. But fabricating excuses, as Kelly did, only makes other adults complicit.

Mass media in the last twenty-five years exacerbates this tendency. (Maybe longer, but that’s when I noticed it.) Prime-time dramas like The O.C., Gossip Girl, or Pretty Little Liars feature sexually precocious “kidults” who often pursue relationships with surrounding adults, including teachers. I still cringe at Veronica Mars, whose teenage protagonist dated an adult cop. Though targeted at teenaged and twenty-something audiences, these shows have significant adult viewership.

These are mass media caricatures, sure, but as our economy allows adults fewer opportunities to make friends their own age, it’s easy to forget the distinction. Age-inappropriate relationships reflect a common adolescent desire: many of us thought ourselves unfairly circumscribed by social standards. And many of us wanted an adult mentor to teach us the ways of adulthood, skipping the fumbling experimentation we needed to understand ourselves.

If the phrase “DNA evidence” took human form, it might look like these guys

Furthermore, these shows distort adult perceptions of what teenagers even are. Labor laws and the vicissitudes of puberty make real teenagers difficult to work with, so most mass media teenagers are played by actors in their twenties. Except for parents or working teachers, most adults have limited opportunities to even see teenagers regularly, and as we drift further from our own teens—when we considered ourselves very mature—we think TV teens are realistic.

Our society produces two equally deleterious responses to adolescent sexuality. Conservative parents advocate for “purity culture” and abstinence-only sex education. These movements keep teenagers swaddled in childhood innocence for years, then dump them on adulthood’s doorstep catastrophically unprepared. More progressive parents take a permissive hand, if not outright encouraging adolescent sexuality, at least providing insufficient adult guidance for making good choices.

Then there’s the third option. Jeffrey Epstein is perhaps an extreme example of adult exploitation, an attempt to commodify teenagers’ sexual inexperience. But almost every teenage girl, and no small fraction of teenage boys, has the experience of being propositioned by adults who see adolescents’ bodies as something to consume. When youths are mature enough to have sex, but not experienced enough to understand sex, they exist in a precarious balance.

Bill Clinton and President Taco may be extreme examples, insulated from consequences for years by power and money. But even before the Epstein revelations, both men were famed for their voracious sexual appetites, both seeing women not as fully developed humans, but as vessels for male gratification. Both men, born to absentee fathers, pursued wealth, power, and the attendant sexual attention, as shields to protect the festering wounds in their souls.

All this is to say, I understand Megyn Kelly’s intent; but she’s still wrong. It’s possible to acknowledge teenagers as sexual beings, and respect their arc of self-discovery, without throwing them to the ravening appetites of dangerous or damaged adults. If we don’t provide the guidance and defense they need, then we’ve failed an entire generation.

On a related topic: Are Age Gaps the New Scarlet Letter?

Breaking Rust: the Final Boss of Country Music

In my father’s household, the only music was country music. And the only country music was honky-tonk. Lefty Frizell, Patsy Cline, and especially Old Hank remained the only benchmark of artistic accomplishment. Dad would permit newer, slightly innovative artists like Alabama or the Oak Ridge Boys into the house, but for all practical purposes, Dad believed good music ended when the Statler Brothers stopped having chart hits.

I remembered Dad’s rock-ribbed loyalty to old-school authenticity this week, when a generative AI song hit number one on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart. Breaking Rust appears to be an art project combining nostalgic country sounds with still images; music journalist Billy Dukes tried, without success, to track the originating artist. Critics, journalist, and armchair philosophers are debating what Breaking Rust means for future commercial music.

“Walk My Walk” is a pleasant, but undistinguished, Nashville hat-act song. Rhythmically, it’s a prison work song, and the lyrics tap into a White working-class motif of “hard livin’ won’t break me.” The digitally generated voice has a deep bass rumble with a nonspecific Southern accent, a sort of dollar-store Johnny Cash. Its message of facing poverty and setbacks with dignity and grace goes back decades in country music.

We shouldn’t over-interpret the track’s success. It topped a relatively obscure chart, not Country Airplay or Hot Country Songs. Because it exists wholly digitally, and the artist is apparently unsigned to a Big Three label, Breaking Rust’s success probably reflects the Spotify algorithm. It bears repeating, as Giblin and Doctorow write, that half of all music in America gets heard through Spotify, giving one algorithm extreme control of American taste.

That’s saying nothing about whether number one means anything anymore. I’ve written previously that, far from reflecting public taste or artistic merit, as it supposedly did during the heyday of Elvis or the Beatles, Billboard now often reserves the top slot for the blandest, most committedly inoffensive tracks. Far from the best song out there, today’s number one is the song most conducive to playing as background music while studying or commuting.

Breaking Rust is the smoothest puree of recent country music, with its sound, its lyrical themes, and even mid-tempo walking rhythm. I fear I’m repeating myself, as I’ve recently written something similar about AI-generated television. But I’ll repeat myself: AI “art” inevitably results in what mathematicians call “regression toward the mean.” That is, the larger your core sample, the closer your product falls toward dead center.

The AI-generated portrait of Breaking Rust: the ultimate banal Marlboro Man

Yet for algorithm-driven entertainment businesses, regression isn’t a flaw. Country music itself proves this. The genre was founded by hardscrabble people from poor backgrounds, artists who lived the life they described. Hank and Lefty, Jimmie Rodgers and the original Carter Family, were working people who recorded the songs of their friends and communities. Rodgers recorded his final songs literally on his deathbed, because his railroad work had destroyed his lungs.

But around 1963, when the British Invasion caused a sea change in rock music, several former rockers reinvented themselves as country singers. Johnny Cash, Conway Twitty, Jerry Lee Lewis, and even Elvis tapped into the twangy side of their Deep South artistic influences and became country musicians. But in changing their style, they also changed their market: their songs became much more past-oriented and nostalgic.

Growing up, I listened to songs like Cash’s “Tennessee Flat Top Box,” the Statlers’ “Do You Remember These,” and Johnny Lee’s “Cherokee Fiddle,” all of which yearned for a past uncluttered by responsibility, noise, and haste. Country music’s founders sang about working-class rural living—and, in the alt-country enclaves, many still do. But after 1963, naïve yearning for bygone simplicity dominated the radio mainstream.

Even before generative AI, the system reinforced itself. Longing for a simplified past became the soil where new artists grew. Neotraditionalists like Dwight Yoakam, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and Toby Keith built careers around pretending to be older than they were, and wishing they lived in a countrified candyland that only existed in songwriters’ imaginations. Much as I love Johnny and Dwight, their nostalgia became a trap I needed to escape.

In that regard, Breaking Rust is the inevitable outcome. Country music, which began life as White soul music, has been a nostalgia factory since before I was born. Moving out of my father’s house, I had to unlearn the genre’s myths of honest work, stoicism, and White hardship. Other fans chose not to unlearn it, and Breaking Rust has doubled down, becoming the perfect recursive loop of self-inflicted White persecution.

Are Age Gaps the New Scarlet Letter?

Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani (left) and his wife, Rama Duwaji (stock photo)

Let’s start with this reality: no serious commentator cares about the six-year age gap between Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and his wife, Rama Duwaji. The objections, which gained brief modish attention on social media last week, appear largely invented by a pseudonymous columnist for online gossip rag Nicki Swift. Yet it bothers me because it reflects a larger pattern I’ve seen developing in online sexual discourse.

The columnist claims Mamdani’s “marriage is full of glaringly obvious red flags,” but lists only two: the fact that Mamdani and Duwaji met on a dating app, and their age difference. Considering that apps have become perhaps the most common way couples meet, supplanting the previous favorite, introduced through mutual friends, this complaint seems disingenuous. But it also bears mention, because it bespeaks the author’s preconceptions.

Strictly anecdotally, I’ve observed a rising tide of moral panic around sexual mores. While American society has become increasingly accepting of the alphabet soup of Queer identities, we’ve become more puritanical, more prescriptive, about others. Age gaps in particular cause many armchair commentators extreme panic. Again, I’ve observed this purely through anecdote, but the paranoia about “groomers” and age-based abuse has become volatile.

Some weeks ago, another pseudonymous poster asked readers to settle a debate with her husband. A couple of their acquaintance had an age gap: he was 40, she was 30. The poster said her husband claimed this made the man in that relationship a “pedophile.” That reminded me of an older post I’d read, a woman claiming her girlfriends had called her boyfriend a “groomer” because he was 37, and she was 30.

Words like “pedophile” and “groomer” have specific meanings. In strict psychological language, a pedophile has a pathological desire to have sex with a partner who hasn’t yet experienced puberty. More generally, we use the word to describe someone who desires to have sex with a partner deemed too young to consent, regardless of biological maturity. And a groomer systematically coaches someone underage to regard “bad touch” as acceptable behavior.

These accusations share one theme: the capacity to consent. We deem minors to lack the moral capacity to consent to sex, even when their bodies are developed enough to have sex. And we deem minors’ moral development to be malleable, subject to being distorted by malignant influence. These considerations are real. Children, by dint of being children, don’t understand what it means to consent, especially to somebody who’s charming, influential, or dangerous.

My problem arises when we broaden the definition of minority. When we accuse somebody of “pedophilia” for having a relationship with a 30-year-old woman, we’re declaring that grown women are incapable of making moral decisions. We literally infantilize adult women, reducing them to the moral incapacity of a child. We take a serious concern, that manipulative adults will abuse children, and apply that in ways it doesn’t apply.

Our Nicki Swift columnist quotes a Twitter user saying, of the Mamdani marriage: “When he was 18, she would've been 12. Can I get a YIKES??” I respond with the counterquestion: so what? Had they known one another at that age, it would’ve been skeevy, and potentially actionable, depending on their relationship. But they didn’t, so the comparison is immaterial. They didn’t meet until their twenties, when both were adults.

The reasonable desire to protect children from predatory adults, has morphed into a belief that we must protect adults from each other. In so doing, we reduce adults, mostly grown women, to the stunted moral agency of overgrown adolescents. Please don’t misunderstand: I say “we” do this, but it’s in the hands of online moral scolds who mean well, but reduced the issue into caricature.

British sociologist Stanley Cohen coined the term “moral panic” to describe this distortion. A social concern, usually grounded in a kernel of truth, confounds people with media access. But those people perceive the problem as more pervasive than it actually is, and sell their audience on the imminent crisis. The Satanic Panic of the 1980s is a good example. So is QAnon, the accusation of sexual predation among America’s elites.

Social media puts more people in positions to start, or amplify, moral panics. That’s what the Nicki Swift article does: it takes a realistic concern about sexual abuse, and applies it in a slapdash way. But social media also gives more people the opportunity to stand in the way of cascading panic. That’s the point we’re at now: we need to refuse to lose our composure about made-up problems.

The First and Last Days of AI TV

When this screencap of a hypothetical AI-generated sitcom hit social media, critics focused, perhaps not unfairly, on the phantom hand holding the floating guitar. Notice also that it mashes Penny’s kitchen together with Monica Geller’s living room, or that some pieces of furniture are vanishing into other pieces, Beetlejuice-style. Or that both women are clearly Alyson Hannigan circa 2010. Visually, it’s a mess.

The source video was yanked shortly after posting, so heaven only knows whether this “sitcom” is funny. But how many of them are? Based on this orphaned screencap, it looks like an unholy collaboration between Chuck Lorre and Hieronymus Bosch. Worse, it looks like an inbred bastard child of every White sitcom of the last thirty years. Which explains why the poster, a generative AI enthusiast, thinks it’s great.

It also explains why, if programmers could successfully remove the psychedelic artifacts, networks will likely buy it. Since Friends debuted in 1995, most American sitcoms have featured some variation on its beat sheet. How I Met Your Mother, The Big Bang Theory, Everybody Loves Raymond, and Community have been largely reskinned variations on Friends. But even Friends itself simply scrubbed the Blackness from Living Single and resold it.

Generative AI consumes the largest possible sample of existing media, whether images or text, and regurgitates something passably similar. The law of averages foretells that, the larger our core sample, the more the product will drift toward the middle. Thus, an AI enthusiast will regard the blandest, most derivative product as a triumph of the art form. We know it works because it resembles everything we’ve seen before.

Unfortunately, the network commissioners who buy content will probably also love it. I’ve written before, primarily about music, how the corporate conglomerates that control our media have become risk-averse. They literally have analytic software and focus groups, modeled on the latest behavioral economics, to reassure shareholders that all new content sufficiently resembles everything that’s been successful before.

We could argue that this happens because corporate overlords see their product not as art, but as content. It also reflects chokepoint capitalism, since all music, to succeed, must pass Spotify’s filters, and all TV ultimately heads for Hulu, Netflix, or Disney+. But it also reflects changes in consumption. The streaming services that control our viewing and listening require massive audiences to keep subscription prices low, and 🌟art🌟 can’t do that.

Gone are the days of subcultures and audience segmentation. Streaming services generate audiences, not by creating something innovative or uplifting, but by remaining minimally offensive. Admittedly, this isn’t new in mass media, as network TV’s largely interchangeable Westerns of the 1960s segued into spy thrillers in the 1970s. I’ve already commented on how Friends’ cinematic, character-driven style displaced Norman Lear-style three-camera sitcoms anchored to bankable stars.

Generative AI will reduce this trend to silliness. The nameless spec clip memorialized above shows how the system reduces storytelling so thoroughly, it pinches the same actress twice. If the existing model reduces BIPOC actors to contract players holding supporting parts, generative AI will eliminate them completely. One needn’t ponder hard how it will treat disabled actors, or even capable but slightly funny-looking actors. Like me.

Children and the aged are also underrepresented on existing TV, and often reduced to stereotyped, moralistic roles. Aging actors already struggle to get parts, especially if they don’t have established star power—and that goes double for women. If existing sample TV shows and movies have few children or older adults, the middle-of-the-road produce will inevitably have even fewer, a trend likely to only compound over time.

I don’t want to romanticize the past, especially the recent past. Disney currently shepherds talent like Ariana Grande or Olivia Rodrigo from childhood, molding them according to data and metrics, creating a media landscape already struggling with anodyne blandness. Constant remakes of lucrative IPs like Dune, Harry Potter, Gossip Girl, and Stephen King, reveals corporate leadership paralyzed with fear at even the most rudimentary innovation.

AI is thus not a declension, but an extension of already existing trends toward the mean. It accelerates corporate media’s desire to produce the blandest, most studiously inoffensive oatmeal. In the constant struggle between art and commerce, it supports the bean counters. By controlling the kinds of stories and faces available to viewers, it promises to continue starving the public imagination at a pace once unimaginable.

In short, it helps nobody but the shareholders. One wonders what will help them, when we shut off the TV and read a book.

SNAP Disaster and Our Un-Free Market

By the time you read this, you’ll already know whether America’s federal government has suspended SNAP (“food stamp”) benefits, or whether President TACO has done what he regularly does, reversing himself at the last minute. This of course matters for millions of American families. But in the long term, I question whether the event itself matters more than the systematic weaknesses it exposes in the American economy.

Walmart, America’s largest brick-and-mortar retailer, receives almost a quarter of all SNAP benefit spending, according to Axios. This reflects multiple factors: for instance, that Walmart exists in all fifty states and most territories. But it also reflects their decision to place themselves in chronically underserved neighborhoods and communities. Walmart has a near-monopoly stranglehold on many areas’ food supply, and they use it.

I can’t be the only news junkie who remembers the Great EBT bollix of 2013. I’ve already written about the event itself, and the moralistic outrage it precipitated online. The ways in which Walmart has no only gobbled up its captive market, but has become the necessary go-to for its market’s rush buying, reflects that America’s consumer economy is not free. The corporation has established permanent colonies in its market’s collective imagination.

This didn’t just happen. Informed critics have described how Walmart utilizes public subsidies to corner markets. Their government largesse often totals in the billions of dollars, and includes many of their own employees relying on SNAP benefits. This isn’t news; I discovered it in the 1990s. Economist John C. Médaille even asserts that even the interstate highway system functions as a subsidy, as Walmart’s just-in-time restocking method depends on reliable, wide roads.

Nominally, Walmart remains a private entity controlled by shareholders, mostly the Walton family. But its success has relied heavily on public-private partnerships and government welfare. Given this symbiosis, and the corporation’s ability to manipulate Defense Department levels of money, it bears asking when Walmart, and corporations of its size, stop being private companies, and become de facto shadow government bureaus.

Current events, however, reveal how precarious that market stranglehold really is. The threatened SNAP shutdown has caused fears of Walmart riots—not from the company itself, which rejects the rumors, but from ordinary customers repeating scuttlebutt online. If Walmart controls a neighborhood’s access to food, clothing, and domestic goods, then cutting off that access doesn’t just hurt the community. It also radicalizes its members to demand the goods hidden behind the wall.

Nor do I use the word “radicalize” lightly. The French Revolution happened amid a combination of massive imperial wealth, and unequal distribution, to the point where Jean Valjean’s loaf of bread has become iconic. Argentina came close to a populist revolution in 2001 because people couldn’t afford groceries, although groceries remained available. Argentina kept exporting food, especially beef, during its economic nadir; regular Argentinians just couldn’t afford it.

Appallingly similar conditions exist now. Elon Musk is currently tracking to become the world’s first trillionaire, money he can never possibly spend. Meanwhile, Walmart, as the largest SNAP vendor, has food available to sell, but SNAP recipients, most of whom are employed, simply can’t afford to buy it. If working-class Americans go hungry long enough, one wonders whether we might, for the first time since Bacon’s Rebellion, develop a sense of class solidarity.

Before continuing, I’ll acknowledge I’m slightly contradicting my past self. I recently made excuses for the influence which dollar stores have on America’s rural communities, saying that they create a nascent sense of economic self-determination. Of course, Dollar General has an almost Walmart-like grip on many communities, and they’re as vulnerable to a SNAP shutdown as any other monopolistic retailer.

Yet I stand by my prior opinion. I admitted that Dollar General is imperfect, and called it a transitional stage for rural economics. By teaching country dwellers that they, too, deserve nice things, I’d argue they also teach country dwellers to join forces to demand nice things. I still believe that’s true, and it encourages small town people, who often swallow a “rugged individualism” economic pill, to see their situation as collective, not atomized.

These events reveal that Walmart, Dollar General, and other near-monopolies rely upon government support on both the supply and the demand ends. A market economy in a massively technological society requires a stabilizing hand that remains responsive to the populace, not the plutocrats. We may reorganize that stabilizing hand, but if it does the job of a government, then that’s what it is. Modernity demands, not negates, a strong state.